Every decision was cursed: "Their Last Full Measure: 1 of 6: The Final Days of the Civil War" by Joseph Wheelan.

(Photo: "Soldiers in the trenches before battle, Petersburg, Va., 1865. 111-B-157." This description is incorrect. The online file at the National Archives, ARC Identifier 524576 / Local Identifier 111-B-157, states "The Petersburg identification appearing in the official caption received by NARA from the Army Signal Corps, and appearing as well in the 1897 War Department Library Catalogue, based presumably on rough captioning that came to the War Department from the Mathew Brady Studio when the War Department purchased the glass negatives from Brady in 1874-1875, has been disputed by Civil War historians and photo-historians for a number of years. In the early 1980s, research by Larry Strayer, Brian Pohanka, Harris Andrews, and William Frassanito uncovered documentary evidence suggesting that this image of Union forces was taken by Andrew J. Russell just before the Second Battle of Fredericksburg in the spring of 1863, not at Petersburg Virginia, as the caption for the image among NARA's holdings of Brady photographs notes. A group of five Russell photographic prints bearing Fredericksburg references in their captions, including another copy of this image, can be found in the holdings of the Western Reserve Historical Society (WRHS) in Cleveland, Ohio. The hand written caption on the WRHS copy of the photo (presumably by A. J. Russell the photographer) is “Line of Brooks' Division at Fredericksburg, May 2, 1863. Rebels charged here 20 minutes after the picture was taken but were repulsed and driven back.” As well, the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center has this same photo listed with a Fredericksburg origin, and a smaller archive at the Medford, Massachusetts Historical Society has it listed as “Entrenched Union soldiers, May, 1863” which corresponds to Fredericksburg rather than Petersburg.")

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Every decision was cursed: "Their Last Full Measure: 1 of 6: The Final Days of the Civil War" by Joseph Wheelan.

Dramatic developments unfolded during the first months of 1865 that brought America's bloody Civil War to a swift climax.

As the Confederacy crumbled under the Union army's relentless "hammering," Federal armies marched on the Rebels' remaining bastions in Alabama, the Carolinas, and Virginia. General William T. Sherman's battle-hardened army conducted a punitive campaign against the seat of the Rebellion, South Carolina, while General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant sought to break the months-long siege at Petersburg, defended by Robert E. Lee's starving Army of Northern Virginia. In Richmond, Confederate President Jefferson Davis struggled to hold together his unraveling nation while simultaneously sanctioning diplomatic overtures to bid for peace. Meanwhile, President Abraham Lincoln took steps to end slavery in the United States forever.

Their Last Full Measure relates these thrilling events, which followed one on the heels of another, from the battles ending the Petersburg siege and forcing Lee's surrender at Appomattox to the destruction of South Carolina's capital, the assassination of Lincoln, and the intensive manhunt for his killer. The fast-paced narrative braids the disparate events into a compelling account that includes powerful armies; leaders civil and military, flawed and splendid; and ordinary people, black and white, struggling to survive in the war's wreckage